The Consultant's Nightmare

Anyone who has supported internal or external clients has experienced this: you’re brought in for your proven expertise in a certain area to support the achievement of a certain result, you do a good job of discovery, develop robust solutions – and the client resolutely insists on doing things that undermine the impact of those solutions, regardless of your warnings or predictions.

We’d normally call this “shooting themselves in the foot”. The Germans have a great sports-based analogy from the realm of soccer for this: Eigentor schiessen , which implies the act of tearing off in the wrong direction, toward the goal you’re defending, and scoring one for your opponent. (The American football equivalent may come even closer to what’s frustrating about this: the signals have been received from the sidelines, it’s a brilliant play that would save the game, the ball is snapped, and simultaneously, people on your team quit playing their positions while the ball-carrier self-assuredly runs the wrong way down the field. And you’re watching it all, thinking, “this isn’t what we agreed to!”).